thought i’d start transferring over the reviews i normally publish on Facebook’s applications. these are the latest books — well, graphic novels — that i’ve read in the last week or so. i’ve expanded on some of my thoughts, too.

Hellraiser: Collected Best, Vol. 2: The stories are just so so, but Hellraiser is Hellraiser. I’ll always enjoy Cenobite stories, even crappy ones. The stories that worked, at least for me, riffed upon the Hellraiser mythos in a way that resonated with the themes of erotic exploitation of the flesh found in Clive Barker’s own The Hellbound Heart. But even ones that didn’t visually feature Cenobites could succeed dancing around those ideas. The stories I started skimming through utilized forced abstraction. It felt too imitative of Barker.

Lovecraft: Wonderful artwork depicting a would-be version of Lovecraft’s real life and nightmares. Too bad it ends so quickly, but that’s part of its charm. You get a glimpse into a what-if scenario that most Lovecraft fans — of which I want to become one, but not unlike Tolkien, his stories are very densely written — would wish was the true backstory. That said, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t enjoy Lovecraft’s stories more if they were all presented in graphic novel form.